{"id":4680,"date":"2018-09-06T05:00:58","date_gmt":"2018-09-06T12:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=4680"},"modified":"2018-09-02T08:31:52","modified_gmt":"2018-09-02T15:31:52","slug":"mark-reads-the-book-of-night-with-moon-chapter-12-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2018\/09\/mark-reads-the-book-of-night-with-moon-chapter-12-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘The Book of Night With Moon’: Chapter 12, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the first part of the twelfth chapter of The Book of Night With Moon<\/i>, Rhiow comes to a shocking realization. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Feline Wizards<\/i>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You know, my brain is a special thing sometimes. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how I read the end of the last chapter and thought, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hey, the rogue wizard is the one on Ordeal!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so obvious that this is a misreading of the text because all the signs that Ith is the wizard on Ordeal are right there. A young wizard sent on a dangerous, confusing task, whose motives seem confusing and bewildering to outsiders, who had to recite an Oath before it all began\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 holy shit.<\/p>\n

Ith is on Ordeal.<\/p>\n

ITH IS A SAURIAN WIZARD.<\/p>\n

But I do<\/i> actually understood why this confused me. Up to this point, Rhiow and the other feline wizards have been adamant about the fact that there are no saurian wizards. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been stated as fact multiple times thus far, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always been said with certainty. And why would these characters ever doubt this fact? That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the whole point<\/i>. They didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what had happened long ago, and that makes for a fascinating element to The Book of Night With Moon<\/i>. Technically, Rhiow is an unreliable narrator who doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know<\/i> that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unreliable. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been spewing a falsehood because she didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know any better! There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no malice in it either. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just what she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been taught and she observed. So at the end of the last chapter, my mind simply assumed that this rogue wizard was the one on Ordeal and had recited the Oath not as an offer to Ith, but because they themselves were a wizard\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 on Ordeal? Okay, this doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make a whole lot of sense in hindsight. I TRIED, OKAY.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s jump into this, because there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so much more to this reveal that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m eager to talk about. Namely, though, I need to shriek at all of you because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m obsessed<\/i> with the growing friendship between Ith and Arhu. Seriously, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t read anything else into this:<\/p>\n

Rhiow glanced ahead at Arhu, half-expecting some reaction along the lines of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been to Mars?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut he was paying no attention. He and Ith were still walking together, talking quietly. The temptation to eavesdrop was almost irresistible. Two wizards on Ordeal, one of them almost certainly the first of his species: what was going on?<\/i> Impossible to tell, but their body language had not warmed in the slightest. The brains holding this discussion might belong to wizards, both part of the same kinship\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut the bodies were those of cat and serpent, distrusting one another profoundly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Oh my god, THERE IS SO MUCH TO UNPACK HERE. It is<\/i> amazing to me that the kinship starts at all, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what often happens when there is a shared experience. And in this case, these two characters have to bridge a divide that has divided their species for ages. WHICH IS ALSO INCREDIBLY CRUCIAL TO THE MYTHOLOGY OF THIS BOOK, OH MY GOD. So, yes, I want you to know that I am so<\/i> completely taken in by these characters becoming friends, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also a masterful bit of foreshadowing for Rhiow\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s epiphany. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of the reasons this is so fraught and why their body language speaks to the complexity of it all. They have an instinctual distrust of one another; both characters were fed a deeply vital story about how the other one is their enemy. The serpent imagery is intrinsic to the story of the People\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Choice, and the Great One poisoned all the minds of the saurians to despise those who lived under the sun. And yet, before our very eyes, a saurian and a feline are getting along. Not only that, but MULTIPLE TIMES, Urruah has to tell these two characters to shut the hell up<\/i> because they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop talking. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like two people at a sleepover who are just so thrilled to be in each other\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presence and the parents have to keep popping in to tell them to go to sleep. IT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S THAT EXACT SAME DYNAMIC, I KNOW IT.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so exciting about this is that Ith appears to be the first saurian who was brave enough to break from the pack. I understand why that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the case, too, given how this society was organized. They all lived under the threat of becoming a meal for someone else, and when that threat hangs over your head, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easy to see why everyone always<\/i> stayed in line. Ith is different, though, and his story of how he chose not<\/i> to eat another saurian and<\/i> to escape the gaze of other saurians was riveting. Ith doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even know how important this change might be to the saurians as a whole!\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Which brings me to Rhiow\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s epiphany. I love a plot twist that makes perfect sense but never once occurred to me, and that perfectly describes this. Holy shit, there was a reason<\/i> that the Oath that Ith heard seemed so similar to the one for the People. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a reason why no one even considered that there were saurian wizards. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a reason why the saurians and the People hated one another; IT WAS MOST LIKELY DESIGNED THAT WAY. Or maybe \u00e2\u20ac\u0153designed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the wrong word. Rhiow\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s theory\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat the Lone One tricked<\/i> the Wise Ones into believing that they had completed their Choice when they most definitely had not\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsuggests that these two developed an enmity over time that could have been prevented had their species\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 not been torn apart. But this horrible reality was not even a possibility in my mind! I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know the Lone One could do something like this! IT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S SO FUCKED UP. Even worse so because of what this means for Rhiow and her<\/i> people:<\/p>\n
And the choice was plain. Choose one way, refuse your species\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 help, and drive the serpents out into the cold and the dark, damning them all. Let life be as it is, unchanged and stable, to be relied upon.<\/p>\n
Choose another way and lose your species\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 autonomy forever, or whatever illusion of it you have had until now. The People\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s whole proud history becomes merely a footnote, a preliminary to the advent of these newborns, unable to make their own way without help. Turn your kind into midwives to a race that had its chance and lost it, a million years ago.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
An entire reinvention of the myth of the People. If I understand this correctly, this would change history, wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it? It would rewrite an origin story and a Choice because the People would have<\/i> to have been involved in the Choice for the saurians. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not like this is something that Rhiow can just ignore. Oh, no, Iau made that abundantly clear:\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Iau, why are you dumping this on me?<\/i><\/p>\n
You were there<\/i>, came the answer, definite and instantaneous, its Source unmistakable. Or rather: You were not there. You are there <\/i>now.<\/i><\/p>\n
Choose.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so immense and overwhelming, and lord, this line knocked me down flat. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t lost on me that such a huge thing landed in Rhiow\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lap at this specific moment:<\/p>\n
Unfair, that at the time when I would most like to die, I must now fight hardest to live longest<\/i>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Powers That Be don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fuck around, y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all. Nothing is a coincidence, and they care not for what might inconvenience a wizard. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tough, obviously, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t envy Rhiow this choice. Someone is going to die, and if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a single member of the team, then all<\/i> of them are stuck in the Downsides, locked out of time and their home, never to return. But Rhiow can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ignore this. No, she won’t<\/i> ignore this. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s here, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seen the injustice, and she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to do what she can to right it.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/youtu.be\/4pOoqp-Nlcw<\/p>\n
Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n
– My YA contemporary debut, ANGER IS A GIFT<\/a>, is now out in the world!\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>If you’d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the first part of the twelfth chapter of The Book of Night With Moon, Rhiow comes to a shocking realization. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Feline Wizards.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[547,548],"tags":[513,549],"class_list":["post-4680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feline-wizards","category-the-book-of-night-with-moon","tag-diane-duane","tag-mark-reads-feline-wizards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}